Blog Post 1
Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and engaging with the online community.
John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight one of the latest examples of the increasingly popular phenomonum of satirical news shows. Oliver covers a variety of topics each week in short segments, before dedicating the majority of his 30 minute timeslot to cover a singular issue in greater depth.
Oliver’s content and presentation style are both informative and humorous, taking serious topics and events and discussing them while simultaneously lampooning those involved and making jokes about the events/issue at hand.
The show focuses heavily on engaging the audience and encouraging virality. To aid in the humorous approach to covering stories, the show uses graphics in the top left corner often filled with humorous images that accompany what Oliver is discussing, often using photoshopped images to make people or events seem ridiculous, using a similar style to “memes” or “reaction images” popularised on online forums and social media. Other times short video clips are used, sometimes to explain the topic and other times purely for comedic effect, sometimes going to (relatively) large effort for a joke.
For example in the segment on the NCAA, covering how players are paid nothing even when appearing in licensed products such as video games, a satirical commercial for such a game was produced for the show (begins at 18:20 in this clip from the official Youtube channel).
It included 3D animation, voice-over work and fake boxart, this lengthy foray into fake video game commercials adds nothing to the serious discussion of the issue, it is merely a recap of all the previous discussion rolled into something very funny, very memorable and most importantly very sharable.
This meshes well with Last Week Tonight as the show relies on its online presence for a large portion of its audience. The official Youtube channel has over two million subscribers and videos regular receive over 6 million views, screen shots and small segments are shared on social media for their “hilarious, but true” value.
However, the most obvious example of this is the hashtags that are created by the show, usually as mockery of a famous company or individual related to the episodes main topics.
In this lengthy segment ( relevant section beginning at 15:25) the Tobacco, a new mascot for the Marlboro cigarette company is suggested, a diseased lung named Jeff. Oliver also asks the audiance and viewers at home to “help out” and spread the image via the hashtag #jeffwecan, in an attempt to place the image of a “diseased lung wearing a cowboy hat” when Marlboro is googled.
The attempt succeeded and this image still remains the no.1 result when searching for “Marlboro Mascot” on the internet, and remains in the top 30 for searches of “Marlboro”. This proves not only the effectiveness of spreading messages through social media, but also the audiences willingness to do so.
By engaging in, and promoting internet culture and deliberately encouraging virality in his content John Oliver starts voluntary “activism”, increased audience engagement with the show and an impressive amount of free advertising for his brand and HBO.